Disinformation are spreading like wildfire in Europe, for political or commercial manipulation, hampering efforts to contain the pandemic, and ripping apart our society’s social fabric. Lives literally depend on all of us listening to health authorities and our ability to access, rely and trust reliable information. Yet more and more European citizens find themselves unable to do so.
Many technical approaches against the spread of fake news either rely entirely on human fact-checks or entirely on AI. We want to combine the accuracy and pluralism of fact-checks from trusted journalists with the scalability machine based validation.
We also see this as an opportunity to showcase the excellent work already done by fact-checkers and to raise citizens' awareness of the importance of media pluralism and the unprecedented existential challenge COVID represents for the news sector.
We will leverage our existing contacts to partner with fact-checkers, traditional media, European civil society and policymakers for our product dissemination and continuous improvement. We are also committed to transparency and a human rights-based approach – including with regards to the recognition of the intrinsic limitations of the technology that we offer.
“Frankie”, detects disinformation about COVID-19 by checking if similar texts were already debunked on a website of independent fact-checkers and high-quality publishers. If that is the case we provide a link to the fact-check and thus not only inform the user of a disinformation but also help to disseminate the work of these organizations.
We provide multiple Interfaces for users to interact with our system. For this Hackathon we want to develop:
- A chrome extension, which "scans" visited websites on disinformation about COVID-19
- A text field on our website, where users can insert texts from sources like Whatsapp or Facebook
- A public API which is not only used by the previous UIs but can also be embedded into other Apps
Let's start with the server, assuming python3 is already installed.
- Setup virtualenv (if not installed yet follow these instructions: Link)
cd path/to/your/fakenews/directory
python3 -m virtualenv ./env
source env/bin/activate
pip install -r requirements.txt- Run local development server
python wsgi.py- Install Chrome Extension:
- Go to you chrome browser and enter
chrome://extensions - In the upper right corner enable the developer mode by clicking on the switch button.
- Click on Load unpacked in the upper left corner
- Select path/to/your/fakenews/dir/chrome_app
- Optional: Adapt score threshold by clicking on Details -> Extension options
- Have fun with Frankie (e.g. test it on https://www.poynter.org/?ifcn_misinformation=coronavirus-was-created-from-hiv)
Complete dataset cannot be distributed because of news publisher copy rights. Use build_Frankie_dataset.py to obtain dataset.
To obtain dataset run:
python build_Frankie_dataset.pywithin directory where .py file is located.
The dataset consists of 4623 fact checks in the period from January 14, 2020 until April 23, 2020. It includes 90 unique fact-checkers, 170 unique countries, and 38 unique ratings (labels).
The features in the dataset are the following:
- fact_checker: Agency that checked the fact.
- date: Date when it was published in Poynter.
- location: Which country(ies) the fact check was primary originated.
- label: How fact was rated by the fact-checker.
- title: Headline of the fact.
- explanation: Explanation of the raking given.
- claim_originated_by: Who claimed the fact.
- url_checker: URL for the full article of the fact checker about fact check.
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